I personally think locals are a waste of time, though others like them. Their range is
so short, you can't do much with them. Regular fighters at least can fly off to some
other part of the map and stay on station a while, allowing them to intercept more
than one flight of planes before they start begging to come home.

IMO, flight time > shooting power.

use locals with your fighters.
and play primarily with your tb's to learn how to do it.
any other pilots need to go in any spare slots you may have.

locals will bring down relatively high level planes, you will still loose all your locals
though

play close to your battle ship lines and provide air cover for them takeing out bombers
and scouts.

thats pretty much all you can do at low level.

Your fighters aren't high enough level to pick on anything but scouts and low level
bombers. fighters will eat them and high level bombers can ignore them long enough to
drop their payload.

I'd recommend running with all 4 TB's and torping people for a living, then rotating in 2
fighter pilots at a time and running 2 small flights of fighters to chase scouts. Any
time you play a cruiser or AA ship in GB, throw all 4 pilots into the support slots for
the XP.

Once your fighters all hit 75, you can start running them as your primary payload. But
high level fighters will still eat them unless you can get your hands on a high level
seaman to boost them closer to the skill cap.